Kudakwashe Maradzika Expands Media Firm to Develop African IP

What changed

Zimbabwean creator Kudakwashe “Kudi” Maradzika is expanding Lincoln Green Media beyond film and television into intellectual-property development across live action, comics and animation. The company is developing her original comic property Artemis Elixa and adapting Cameroon-based Zebra Comics’ Beasts of Tazeti into animation with a South Korean partner.

That strategy follows the international success of Bad Influencer, the seven-part Johannesburg-set Netflix series Maradzika developed through the Realness Institute and Netflix Episodic Lab before Gambit produced it. The series reached No. 3 on Netflix’s Global Top 10 for English-language television and drew four million views from 3 to 9 November 2025.

Why it matters

Maradzika is treating a successful screen project as a starting point, not a finish line. Lincoln Green Media, founded in 2022 and operating across South Africa and Zimbabwe, is building stories that can live in several forms rather than depending on a single television release.

That matters because ownership changes what a creative company can keep developing after the first screen deal. A comic can become animation. An animated property can lead back to live action. In Maradzika’s model, the story itself is the asset moving between formats.

The cross-border work also shows how that model is being built in practice: a Zimbabwean-led company, a Cameroonian comic property and a South Korean animation partner. Whether these projects match Bad Influencer’s reach is still unknown, but the direction is clear. Local detail is not being treated as something to sand away before a story travels. It is part of what Maradzika is trying to carry with it.